The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith, a Princeton professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, has received a National Book Award, the 2025 award for poetry, for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.

The prestigious awards from the National Book Foundation celebrate the best literature published in the United States, with one award each for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Two Princetonians were finalists for the 2025 nonfiction award: professor Yiyun Li, for her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, and Class of 2005 alumna Julia Ioffe, for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.

Video: Acceptance Speech

Smith accepted the poetry award in front of a live audience at the 76th annual National Book Award ceremony, held Nov. 19 in New York City. In her speech, she thanked her family and then read a section from a piece about visiting her mother in her last days in a nursing home.

Read the full story written by Jamie Saxon on the Princeton University news page.